The tourists are back, although not yet in the numbers that we saw two summers ago. Gas prices, a wet and cold spring, and a recent resurgence in Covid are limiting this year’s migration. Redfish Lake is sixteen inches higher than it was last September, so beach space is limited in front of the Lodge and cabins. It’s still the most crowded half-acre in Idaho, a place that should convince you that humans and walruses descended from a common ancestor.
The spring weather has been good for the grasses and flowers. The hill across the road and the valley floor, even where it’s covered with sage, are a brighter shade of green than we’ve seen for years. Out Highway 21 west of Stanley, whole meadows are dark blue and hot pink with camas and shooting stars.
Warm temperatures have arrived with the summer solstice. Clouds have vanished from the sky, and the long-range weather forecast looks sunny until the summer monsoons come, if they come. Should that happen, we could pretend that it was forty years ago—the summer of 1982—with plenty of water in the river, afternoon rain and thunder, fires that can be put out once they start, non-reserved campsites available for campers, and—if I remember correctly—salmon runs that need only a few years of official encouragement to return in full force.
It may look the same, but the extra heat that has been stored on the planet since 1982 guarantees that our weather isn’t back to normal. Instead, it’s an up-to-the-minute reflection of higher ocean temperatures, the atmosphere’s increased capacity for water vapor and violent downpours, CO2 at 421 ppm, methane levels reaching 1900 ppb, aircraft contrails and coal-plant particulates, and the construction of giant heat islands in the form of megacities. If 1982 had a climate, what we’ve had this spring is a facsimile, one that walks, talks, and parties like it was 1982. But it’s not.
You don’t have to go far to find facsimiles of more lethal seasons. Recent floods in Yellowstone and China have been described as thousand-year events, at least until next year.
You can only tell how often things happen after the fact. Until then, a thousand-year event that washes your house away only means that you have twice the bad luck of the person whose house is washed away by a five-hundred-year event.
The American Southwest is turning into a desert. The Great Salt Lake isn’t so great anymore, having shrunk by two-thirds since 1982. Dry lakebeds in Oregon are causing dust storms in Boise. Heat waves are killing people in Pakistan and India this year, after killing them in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon last year. Giant forest fires are turning vast areas of Australia, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Canada into blackened and sterilized ground. Glaciers are disappearing all over the world, including ones supplying water to millions of people.
It appears that our thousand-year-event in Sawtooth Valley is an April-May-June cleverly crafted to resemble the same season forty years gone. It’s here, it’s now, it’s real, but you should wait until fire season before you look around and think you just stepped out of a time machine.
Julie and I have started wearing masks again, because tourist-industry employees in downtown Stanley are coming down with Covid subvariants. People report that it feels like a bad flu for at least two days. So far, no deaths. We do not know if the subvariants are BA.2, BA.4, BA.5, BA.2.12.1, or B.1.529, but the list of subvariants reminds us that 1) Covid hasn’t gone away, 2) it hasn’t stopped mutating, 3) we won’t know its long-term effects until the long-term gets here, 4) vaccines are not a cure, and 5) nobody in the valley can be sure they haven’t had some variant of Covid sometime in the last two-and-a-half years.
We also don’t know what effect Covid uncertainty will have on the tourist industry. No doubt the people starting out on a week-long float trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon will think twice about spending all that time in a boat with an active case of Covid or two, especially when the planning and execution of such a trip involves spending lots of money before anybody gets near the water.
We don’t know about Covid in the campgrounds, Covid at the dog beach, Covid on the crowded trails to Sawtooth and Alice Lakes, or Covid during last weekend’s Grateful Dead cover band concert in the Kasino Club. We don’t know when and if the fatigue of not-knowing will make people finally give up and stay home.
We don’t know if the next subvariant will be more or less lethal. We don’t know if we’ll ever eliminate Covid like we eliminated smallpox. We don’t know how long our boosters will last. We don’t know if we should get another when Pfizer and Moderna release a formula that’s Omicron-specific.
We do know that it will be a long time before medical personnel routinely assume they can make sick people healthy. It will be longer before they stop cheering when a formerly ventilated patient walks out of hospital doors, grinning and waving. It will be a lifetime before they forget the people they couldn’t help, and the people they could have helped but who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated or believe they had Covid until it was too late.
People go into medicine because they want to help people, and, it must be admitted, because the money can be good and the power can be intoxicating. Covid has been a humbling experience on all three counts. It has exhausted front-line medical workers and acquainted them with grief. Many of them opted for retirement once they realized that Covid presented far more questions than answers, more grief than triumph.
Pre-pandemic, death was considered an outrage by physicians, who called it “losing a patient.” Now, with excess deaths totaling more than a million, lost patients aren’t remarkable anymore. Now, it’s called losing a parent, a brother or sister, a friend, or even a child.
When we see tourists backing trailers over burning campfires or screaming over stolen parking spaces or yelling at the person who just told them they’ve got a hard couple of miles between where they are and Sawtooth Lake, we need to remember they’ve probably lost someone they love. When they crowd our blanket on the Redfish Lodge lawn, maybe they’re needing human contact and comfort. Maybe Covid has hit their frontal-lobes and they aren’t thinking right. Maybe they’re staking out their own wilderness refuge from the latest disease of civilization. Maybe they’re exhausted frontline medical workers taking a week away from the latest subvariant surge.
Julie has just come back from Stanley, where she played pickleball and paid $5.73 a gallon for gasoline. It’s the strongest evidence we have that we’re not in some Chamber-of-Commerce bubble, where we hear about wars and rumors of wars but we’re at peace, where we hear lots of Covid death statistics but still don’t know anyone personally who’s died of it, where we’re told that thousands of people in the world are dying in heat waves but we still put on a coat when the sun goes down. Expensive gas is evidence that my old copy of The Limits of Growth isn’t just fiction, because 2022 is when it says energy consumption per capita will noticeably decline. Also industrial production. Also food. It all appears to be on schedule.
We don’t know if the crowds who usually visit this time of year are waiting for warmer weather, or for a new and improved booster shot, or if they’re balancing transportation, restaurant dining, and lodging against the cost of staying home. During tough times, hunkering down becomes a lifestyle choice, one that makes home improvements more important than taking out a second mortgage to buy a Sprinter Van.
It may be that the narratives of tourism are getting shopworn. A campground is created for camping, which sounds obvious enough until you understand that everyone camping there has a story, and they’re not all the same. The military-style trailers that we’re beginning to see at Redfish would not look out of place in contemporary videos from Ukraine, and if they’re attached to a lifted-suspension heavy-duty pickup with rifles in its gun rack, you know you’re looking at a story about survival in the wild, at least for the duration of a campground reservation. Tourists on horseback ride through the Old West conjured by the movies a half-century old: Shane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (if they’re riding through the West of The Wild Bunch I don’t want to hear about it). Photographers set up their cameras on the first set of rapids after float-boaters put in, taking proof-of-the-real photos they’ll later sell to the boaters at the takeout. The rocks on the trails to popular Sawtooth lakes are as worn as the steps to St. Peter’s Basilica, and they serve a similar function.
These sorts of phenomena evoke tourist-as-refugee from job or family or the secular world with its Zoom meetings, public health warnings, and credit card bills. It’s what we saw during the first summer of the pandemic, when all sorts of people who never camped before camped in every available spot in the valley, built fires where they shouldn’t have, showed up shivering and dew-soaked for breakfast at the Stanley Bakery, and in general convinced us we were being overrun by people who were fleeing intolerable situations. Maybe they still are.
The nature of human reality in Sawtooth Valley is such that we experience the outside world as streamed news, pronouncements by politicians, Supreme Court decisions, higher prices, summertime workers, SUVs, RVs, ORVs, ATVs, and cover bands. All is artifact, and our immediate impulse is to try to escape to the mountains ourselves.
But sad experience has taught us that seeing behind the curtain of manufactured experience requires getting off-trail in every possible way you can think of. Occasionally you can find something new and untouched and not part of a narrative in the wilderness. More often you spend hours lost amid deadfall, trying to find a destination that isn’t even on the map, if you even have a map.
The real world might be a tough place, but the toughest thing about it is finding it.
You might not want to find it. The real isn’t that credible anymore. What used to be a reasonably coherent story has fractured into competing visions of reality, none of them particularly convincing. We’ve become adept at spotting the little discrepancies that betray the whole enterprise.
In reaction, lots of us have succumbed to a deliberate nostalgia, best defined as the yearning belief in a past that never existed. Even those visions have an element of the grotesque, as in the attempts to recreate an Alzheimer’s ward cafeteria as a 1950s diner.
Normalcy describes a condition where you get what you expect, at least often enough to expect it. But the last thirty months have trained us to expect only the unexpected, although hindsight says we should have seen the invasion of Ukraine coming. We should have known a pandemic was coming, and that the Supreme Court was going to end women’s right to abortion on demand. We await the next thing we should have expected all along.
In 1972, The Limits to Growth said things were all going to come to a head between 2020 and 2030, and all its doomy curves seem to be intersecting on schedule.
The tourist industry, at least for those of us raised in it, has conditioned us to see the world as a stage set. There’s a difference, though, in accepting the world as an elaborate invitation for the willing suspension of disbelief and seeing the theater flats topple, the actors break character, the playwright scream that’s not what he meant at all, the audience rush the stage. We’re all about to become players in a long Night at the Improv, whether we want to or not.